Painting door and drawer panels for cabinets and the like is a time intensive process. Most contractors who work in this field will lay the panels flat on saw benches, boxes, and other makeshift work pieces. One side then is treated and left to dry. The panels are then flipped over to treat the other side. This is repeated as many times as is necessary to adequately treat, prime, paint, or otherwise finish the door panels. Between actual working time and drying, this process might take five to seven working days or more to complete 20 to 30 doors.
An additional drawback for current door panel preparation is also the amount of floor space typically required to prepare, treat, and dry the door panels. For cabinets in a medium size kitchen, there might be 20 to 30 different panels to work on. Using the makeshift work pieces, where only one or two panels are used per sawhorse pair, for example, the amount of space required to complete the job in an orderly fashion would be quite large.
There have been attempts to decrease the time needed to paint or finish a set of door panels. Various configurations of fixtures have been developed to hold a panel in place while working. These designs, however, still require an unreasonable amount of steps to prepare, paint, and finish a door panel, while not providing much, if any, improvement in the time required to complete the job.